Saturday's Child (77 page)

There's so much to write about now—especially since penning a memoir effectively cures you of wanting to write about yourself. More levels of my consciousness seem aware of one another, a bonus of aging. I dreamed more when I was younger; my sleeps were deeper. Now I
live
my dreams—which is to say that the state of mind that would have been a dream bestows itself on my waking life. There even are moments of sweet gravity when I notice that if aging is a gradual preparation for dying, then I must say it's quite cleverly devised.

Youth is
not
wasted on the young. I'm discovering youth in ways I never knew back when I was age-deprived. For most of my life, I cared desperately what other people thought. In my forties, I decided “Enough!” and announced to any who would listen that I now felt free of being concerned with what others thought. Then I would sneak peeks at their reactions. Now, soon approaching my sixties, I realize it's not that I no longer care what other people think. I do care, actually. It's simply that I finally care more what
I
think.

Could I have lived my whole life as I now do, at last knowing and saying what I want? I wish I could have, but I think not. It's interesting how many solid brick walls, in retrospect, turn out to have been trompe l'oeil—but only once you've crashed through their papier mâché. Age is something to be earned. I'm earning it still, and would cheerfully break the
kneecaps of anyone who tried to steal it from me, or make me settle for the arrested development eternal youth would be.

4. In My Life I've Loved Them All

“Tales of Lovers and Friends.”

Luck plays a big part in all this stuff of living, but no one really warns you about that, or teaches you how to recognize luck when it appears, sometimes in questionable guise. From today's perspective, I feel lucky to have been spared the apparent agony of the high-school experience, which left more than a few of my friends scarred. I feel content to have missed siblings (though they get mixed reviews), but the half-brothers situation mitigated that luck. Married for years to a man practicing bisexuality back in the age of innocence when “safe sex” meant solely contraception, I'm profoundly fortunate, as is Kenneth, to be HIV-free.

As for luck in love, some reviewer once said that my literary signature chord was affirmation. There's a refrain in “The Network of the Imaginary Mother”
⁵
that recurs in two forms: “I affirm all of my transformations” and “I disown none of my transformations.” I'll stand by that—at least by the second one. Happily, I no longer feel I have to affirm everybody
else's
transformations. Some I can blithely stomp on. I'm fairly proud that I tried to be as brave as I was capable of being at any given moment, but prouder that I'm no longer so tolerant of cruel or stupid behavior. All that said (and although I'm sure they might disagree) I think I'm still oddly loyal to my former lovers—despite myself.

But beyond lovers, there are friends. It's taken me a long time to admit that I don't like all my feminist colleagues. (Actually, I wouldn't necessarily like all members of any grouping, and why
should
I?) Luckily, many—like Eleanor Smeal (of the Feminist Majority Foundation), who lives in a different state and is in fact more colleague than friend—
feel
like friends, but that's because Ellie and her ilk are generous, warmhearted people; we share a passionate commitment to the same vision even when we may differ on tactics, and we're able to laugh and pick up our conversation like
old buddies no matter how long it's been since we last spoke. But others—some of whom live in my own city—are full-time feuders, spending all their energy on gossip undercutting women, so I keep my distance from them and their diatribes. Still others—well, I might respect their contributions and be willing to work with them, but that doesn't mean I'd want them for friends. This insight, though banal, is hard-won, since I labored for years under the assumption and hope of a touchy-feely sisterhood. You'd think that would have received its mortal blow somewhere back with the destruction of the Sisterhood Is Powerful Fund, but it kept resurrecting itself.

Sisterhood, then, may be powerful and global, but is not necessarily synonymous with friendship. Friendship is love, without a showy erotic component dominating the discourse, yet it can be just as impassioned and challenging. Friendships require nurturance, and I believe in working at them. I treasure my recently made friends (though, to be honest, I assiduously avoid seeking
out
new ones), but there's a special pride of duration regarding those whose lives have been interwoven with one's own for years; people who've stood as witnesses for each other's tragedies and celebrations. I've known Ned Rorem for almost four decades. Edite Kroll has been my literary agent for twenty years and my friend for over thirty; she was with me in 1968 at the first Miss America protest. Kathleen Barry and I are approaching a thirtieth anniversary as friends. Lois Sasson came into my life in 1974, Lesley Gore not long after, Andrea Dworkin almost the same. “Iliana de Costa,” Theresa Funiciello, Karen Berry, and Alida Brill have each put up with me for around twenty years. I've met with a small group of women friends for dinner monthly since 1987; we've known each other since the early 1970s. Such good people have endured my judgmentalism, punctured my pretentiousness, grounded my melodrama, and helped me survive. As I've tried to do for them.

Years ago, some of us came up with the notion of “chosen family,” which could be composed of friends, work colleagues, extended family members, or all of the above (not necessarily excluding blood relatives); these were people you could call at three in the morning if you had to, but you'd
picked
them, not merely tolerated them because their noses were
shaped like yours. Naturally, given sufficient time, chosen family can be just as irritating as genetic kin, because each grating mannerism becomes as familiar as every endearing trait. Yet if you pay careful enough attention, you notice the lyricism of small, subtle, unique, and lovable details that continually freshen the familiarity.

The aspects I cherish about close friends are distinct from their politics, which are a given. Kathy and I share not only our history but our mutual, ongoing slipped-disk sagas, and I admire the èlan with which she periodically reinvents herself, of late becoming a fine photographer. Theresa and I can talk for hours—about stuffed-artichoke recipes and psychology as well as patriarchal economics—and I treasure her fiery sense of outrage. Andrea and I meet regularly for dinner,
not
necessarily to confer about strategies for combatting pornography or prostitution but to talk about literature; she's one of the few activists with whom I can discuss Kafka at length, or Seamus Heaney's poems, or Kobo Abe's fiction—and we also share the guilty pleasure of being hooked on a spooky TV series modeled on the film
La Femme Nikita
. What I most value about Gloria is the diametric opposite of her glamorous persona: it's the deadline procrastinator, the chocoholic, the shaggy-dog-storyteller, the rabid moviegoer; we once went to see
Superman II
at midnight in Times Square, another time stood in line for Kenneth Branagh's
Hamlet
for over an hour, and we share a devotion to an early Marcello Mastroianni film,
The Organizer
, which I finally found on video and gave her for one of her birthdays. Alida has a ravishing wit; to talk or correspond with her makes me feel as if my head's been spinning in a pencil sharpener and has now been honed to a respectable point. Karen's long-lost Kentucky drawl resurrects itself if she's stressed or tired. Suzanne's face acquires a luminous quality when she registers a new idea or insight that she likes: “
Ohhh
,” she'll say, every feature lighting up, “oh,
that's
interesting!”

Frail, human, imperfect, these idiosyncrasies form the minutiae of familiarity. But they charm the soul almost as much as the laughter that peals from such friendships—and the sometime tears. These are people who understand how to take themselves seriously but not pompously, and who know humor is as integral to love as to sanity.

For better or worse, in sickness and in health. Pronounced friends.

5. Book Ties

“A Tale of Generation.”

It has not escaped me that the two most significant relationships in my life revolved around having a mother and being one.

Blake's presence has been from the first for me a benevolence, opportunity, lesson, and joy. For one thing, though I'd somehow assumed I'd have a daughter, his being a son turned out to be a blessing, in that it's kept me honest.
⁶
On days when I've been tempted toward thinking Men Bad, Women Good, or when certain sexist atrocities have provoked fantasies of androcide, his existence has helped me remember that male human beings are
not
born inherently destructive, cruel, or stupid—no, not just his existence, but
his
existence: the person he is, his quick intelligence, intensity, moral courage, sense of self (and of humor), honesty, and talent. The person he's always been has helped me grow into the kind of mother I wish I'd had, feared I never could be, and now think with pride I pretty much managed to become. The freedom I watched him enjoy in his childhood has helped heal the lack of it in my own.

The only place where my usually boomeranging, self-punishing honesty has wholly succeeded is here, and I believe that Blake is partly the person he is because I never lied to him, and tried to stop anyone else from doing so. Certain hurts are
not
inevitable, need not be passed on, generation after generation.

There's a distinct prejudice regarding mothers and sons. If such a pair demonstrates authentic intimacy and understanding, that elicits raised eyebrows implying depravity, while the same judgment isn't inflicted on a close father-daughter relationship. I believe there's a subtle homophobia inherent in this reaction, as if every mother-son relationship reflected Violet and Sebastian in Tennessee Williams's
Suddenly Last Summer
—that is, when it's not reflecting direct Oedipal incest. After conversations with other close and affectionate mothers and sons, I realize the prejudice is also rooted in plain sexist fear—of a woman in touch with her own mature power, and a man who was once dependent on her yet who remains, even
as an adult, unafraid to love her. Cleansing this relationship from its nay-saying bigots is another item on my Yet To Do list.

Bless him, Blake's never bored me. To this day, even arguing with him can be fun. Meeting the great pianist Artur Rubinstein when he was in his eighties and Blake was perhaps five, my son looked down at the astoundingly long fingers wrapping themselves around his little paw in their handshake, then looked up at the maestro and announced, “I've admired your work for a very long time.” The poet and novelist Jay Parini still recalls the story of coming to visit and telling Blake, then all of six, that he was a professor—to have the child reply with interest, “Really? And what do you profess?” And when he was about eight or nine, the feminist writer Louise Bernikow asked him if he thought she would make a good mother: “That,” he answered gravely, “would depend on the child.” Before he started touring with his own bands in the United States and abroad, his seventeenth-birthday present was accompanying me to Germany (for a conference speech), and thence to London for a holiday, where we indulged our Anglophilia unabashedly, and where he became fixated with awe at the tomb of Henry V—“Hal's actually
in
there!” When I was finishing
Dry Your Smile
, I expressed concern about the quasi-autobiographical protagonist's love relationship with another woman, thinking the book's publication just as he started college might make life awkward for him among new friends. His immediate reply: “If anybody's going to be put off by
that
, I'd rather find out sooner than later, so I don't have to bother knowing them at all.”

As an infant, he'd innocently taught me an unthreatening, tender, free sensuality I'd never before known, which I now realize reflects the experience of many mothers. When he was about three or four—that age when children are diminutive Zen masters—we began a personal game that persisted throughout his childhood, one we still refer to today with a knowing glance. Some would call it a form of meditation, and it does have a quality Buddhists might term “mindfulness.” To us it was just something fascinating and precious to do (not overdo) now and then. It involves looking—really
looking
, carefully, keenly—at some object: wood grain, an apple slice, or the palm of your own hand, until the sight begins to resonate with its own acute reality. Blake would thrill to it, whispering, “This is it, Rob. It's really
happening
. It's
now
. I'm truly
alive
.”

Me too, now, every day, in part thanks to him. It's something he, my beloved friend, understands: this fleeting fastidiousness of spirit.

6. In the Now

“A Mystery Story.”

It's a cold January afternoon, but the garden is alive with traffic at the feeders: slate-grey juncos, song sparrows, black-capped chickadees, weaver finches, ruby-breasted house finches, tufted titmouses, downy woodpeckers, and the flamboyance of bluejays and cardinals. There are mourning doves, too, and ubiquitous city pigeons (it's impossible to feed only the birds you prefer without also serving up survival to pigeons—an elementary political lesson). Sea gulls sometimes drop by after a storm, a duck once landed and looked around, and twice a red-tailed hawk has appeared from nowhere to snap up a pigeon, midair, for lunch (another political lesson, but let's not go there). Since Bran's death, no cat lives here, no dog. I miss that presence, but am not yet ready for another such companion, and may never be. For now, I seem to prefer my pets wild. Having often used others—Kenneth, Iliana, Marilyn, Blake—as an excuse to create living spaces of comfort and beauty yet not feel selfish for doing that, now I can celebrate what sweetness I've created for myself and share it with these creatures. I love coming home to this place, kicking the door shut behind me, dropping my keys, shuffling the mail, drifting through the rooms, undressing, fixing a bite to eat. …